The Duel (20 page)

All government employees were instructed to say their prayers regularly, and the relevant authorities were instructed to make all necessary arrangements for performing prayers in government buildings, airports, railway stations, and bus stops. A special ordinance was passed insisting on total reverence for Ramadan, and cinemas were to be closed during this period for three hours after the evening prayers. Pakistan had never known anything like it, and the results were mixed. Officially encouraged religiosity now became the norm, but with a massive increase in alcohol consumption and every drunkard claiming that he was resisting the dictatorship. The figures on adultery and the observance of fasts can never be established. The Taliban did not as yet exist, but the stage was being prepared. To the credit of the medical profession, doctors refused to preside over or perform “Islamic” amputations, and these particular punishments could never be implemented. Public and prison floggings, however, occurred regularly and further brutalized the country’s fragile political culture.

Unsurprisingly, under Zia, the Jamaat-e-Islami, which had never won more than 5 percent of the vote anywhere in the country, was patronized by the government. Its cadres were sent to fight in Afghanistan, its armed student wing was encouraged to terrorize campuses in the name of Islam, its ideologues were ever present on TV and in the print media. The Inter-Services Intelligence were now instructed by the military leadership to assist the formation of other, more extreme jihadi groups, which carried out terrorist acts at home and abroad. Religious
schools began to be established in the countryside, especially in the frontier provinces. Soon Zia too needed his own political party, and the bureaucracy set one up, the Pakistan Muslim League, with Zia’s favorite protégés: the Sharif brothers and the Chaudhrys of Gujrat. Currently at each other’s throats, they at that time combined their great strengths, one of which was the use of political power to assist the primitive but rapid accumulation of capital.

The Sharif family had become favorites of Zia’s mainly because they had suffered under Bhutto and their hatred for him was unrestrained. Blacksmiths by trade, they had left India and sought refuge in the new Muslim homeland, settling down in Lahore. Muhammad Sharif, a hardworking, semipious disciplinarian, made sure his sons, Nawaz and Shahbaz, were provided with a proper education. The family had done well, their small steel foundries prospered, and if anything they were disinterested in politics. Their refusal to pay protection money to some of the more thuggish Bhutto supporters in Lahore led to their business being targeted and nationalized in 1972. The decision was economically stupid and politically counterproductive. A family of neutral small businessmen were transformed into lifelong enemies of the Bhutto family. The day Zia ordered Bhutto’s execution, Muhammad Sharif and his sons gave thanks to Allah for responding so rapidly to their prayers. The oldest son, Nawaz, became a protégé of the general’s and was made the leader of the
khaki
Muslim League. Transmogrified into politicians by the military, the Sharif family were ever grateful to General Zia. Their primary loyalty, however, was to their own business interests. The foundries had been returned to them but they were no longer enough. Political power was now harnessed to make huge profits largely through securing massive bank loans that were not repaid. This process started early and acquired new momentum after General Zia’s unexpected death.

The second family to benefit from military regimes was the Chaudhry clan based in Gujrat. This is an old Punjabi town, located near the Chenab River, built by the Mogul emperor Akbar and garrisoned by Gujjars, traditionally belonging to a seminomadic caste of cowherds and goatherds (hence the city’s name). The initial function of the town was to supply the Mogul armies with food and other necessities
as they tramped through the region. The Jats, descended from migrant tribes, were farmers who acquired a taste for war and supplied soldiers to the Moguls and later, in much greater numbers, to the British and their successor armies. Some of them settled in the town as well, with constant rivalry between them and the Gujjars.

Gujrat acquired a reputation for craftsmanship—especially pottery— of a high quality during the Mogul period. Few signs of this are left except in the craft of forging currency and especially passports. Before electronic safeguards were introduced, a particular Gujrati craftsman reputedly produced passports and U.S. visas of such high quality that his clients were rarely detected. Such were his skills that government ministers sometimes used him to help their poorer clansmen escape to friendlier climes, an interesting example of self-indictment.

The Chaudhry clan were Jats, and especially during British rule when living standards declined, most of them were badly off and constantly in search of employment. The founding father was Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi. Most of his friends regarded him as a warmhearted and generous rogue. He belonged to Nat, a tiny village near Gujrat, dominated by criminal fraternities whose sense of solidarity left a deep mark on him. His father was much respected locally as an effective river bandit who earned his living by recycling stolen goods. Zahoor Elahi began his adult life as a police constable in British India, a background that could not have been more remote from that of the generals he would later serve.

In 1943, Zahoor Elahi was posted to the Sikh holy city of Amritsar. His brother Manzoor Elahi accompanied him in the hope of finding employment. Zahoor was respectful and worked hard, but also had an ear on permanent alert wherever he was, just in case fate decided to help out. One day he was in the police station when he heard that a local Hindu tradesman, who had infringed some law, was about to be raided.

Sensing an opportunity here, Zahoor Elahi visited the trader that same day and warned him. When the raid took place, the police found nothing. An investigation was launched, the treachery was discovered, and poor Zahoor was sacked from the force.

The businessman was sufficiently grateful to give money to both brothers. Manzoor Elahi was helped to set up a tiny handloom workshop. Then came partition. The brothers returned to their village. One
day Zahoor Elahi went to the Rehabilitation and Compensations office and demanded that they be recompensed for what they had lost (in reality very little). Like many others in those turbulent times, he exaggerated the claim. In those days it was thought that illegal gains should be converted into the most easily transportable commodity, which was either gold or jewelry. Zahoor Elahi displayed an unbridled passion for land and real estate, the genetic traces of which can still be seen in his progeny. He first obtained a large house in downtown Gujrat, in lieu of what was claimed to have been lost in Amritsar. He never looked back, skillfully deploying his natural gifts to gradually build up a large fortune. Once this had been achieved, to his credit he never forgot his past and maintained friendly relations with the local police and criminals, often bringing them together to explain that, despite a difference in profession, they had interests in common.

He was not the only booty politician in the country, but he was one of the most astute. He understood that in politics as well as everyday life, any person with an ounce of sense could reach a goal that gave the lie to his beginnings. Ethics were unnecessary. As befitted a small-town notable, he joined the Muslim League and began to rise in its ranks. With the impressive growth of his property portfolio, his regular pilgrimages to Mecca were combined with duty-free shopping. He always returned with trunkloads of presents for his friends, high and low.

He joined Field Marshal Ayub’s Muslim League, the first of the
khaki
(the appellation derives from the color of their military uniforms) leagues that would become a tiny but important pillar of military rule in the country. He became a party stalwart, providing funds and busing in audiences to make the general feel popular at public meetings. For a self-made man to rise so high in Pakistan was unusual at that time. Others like him found poverty vexatious, but lacked initiative and networking skills. The process would become much more commonplace during the heroin bonanza some decades later, when the entrepreneurial spirit of the Chaudhrys and the Sharifs permeated the big cities and left a permanent mark on the political life of the country. It costs a great deal to become a prime minister.

As long as Bhutto was a cabinet minister in the military regime, Elahi played the sycophant, a role in which he had trained himself since
his days as a young police constable. After Bhutto was sacked by Ayub and was still sulking in his tent thinking seriously about whether to organize a new political party, Elahi turned his back on the fallen minister. He did more. He became a key defender of Ayub inside the Muslim League and cajoled and bribed those who were tempted to leave with Bhutto and managed to keep most of them in the party. Bhutto was never one to forgive a slight, real or imagined. Once in power in 1972, he made it clear that he regarded the Chaudhrys of Gujrat as thieves and pimps who should be treated as such. Attempts by the Chaudhrys to broker a deal with the new leader via intermediaries close to him came to naught. Bhutto’s hatred, once ablaze, always tended toward the indiscriminate. He had an elephant’s memory, as many a civil servant who had avoided him during his years of disgrace was to discover. Zahoor Elahi bided his time. It came sooner than expected. He welcomed Zia’s coup in 1977, developing close relations with the dictator and backing Bhutto’s execution. He ostentatiously asked General Zia to make him a present of the “sacred pen” with which he had signed Bhutto’s death warrant. The chief justice of the West Pakistan High Court, Maulvi Mushtaq Hussain, who had behaved abominably in court during Bhutto’s trial for murder, had become a close friend of Zahoor Elahi’s. In 1978, he was in Lahore lavishing his hospitality on the judge. Both men were in the car that was taking the judge back to his home in Lahore’s Model Town district. A group of al-Zulfiqar gunmen opened fire. The judge, who was the target, ducked and avoided the bullet meant for him. Chaudhry was felled. Zahoor Elahi had not been the target, but al-Zulfiqar, embarrassed at missing the judge, claimed he was also on their list, which may have been true.

Whatever the truth, Zahoor Elahi became an instant martyr. The anniversary of his death is marked in Gujrat each year with great pomp and ceremony by his family (usually government ministers), and streets have been named after him. After his death, his oldest son, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, inherited the mantle and became a crucial power broker in General Zia’s
khaki
Muslim League. Total power, however, continued to elude the Zahoor Elahi clan. The Sharif family had the Muslim League contract, but the Chaudhrys maintained family tradition by masking their resentment. They waited patiently. Their chance
would come a decade later when another general, Pervez Musharraf, seized power.

But the Chaudhrys, along with the Sharifs, prospered well enough during the Zia years. So did the Pakistan army, to which the war in Afghanistan had given an enormous boost. It was a frontline ally of the United States against the godless Communists. And Zia and his generals knew only too well that without the financial and military support of the United States and also of China, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt, it would not have been so easy to win. The ISI and CIA watched and applauded as Russian technicians and their families were killed, disemboweled, and their heads displayed on posts. This was sweet revenge for Vietnam. Meanwhile Prince Turki bin Faisal, the Saudi chieftain promoting the war, dispatched Sheikh Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan to further advance the struggle by demonstrating to the Believers that the Saudis were behind them and not to worry too much about America. The story has been well documented, but what is not stressed often enough is how this war wrecked the northwestern regions of Pakistan. The consequences are still sharply felt.

The crude but effective ISI manuals used to fight Moscow are once again proving helpful, this time to the forces fighting the United States in Afghanistan today. One of the anti-Soviet commanders, Abdul Haq, told admiring Western journalists that the mujahideen did not actually target civilians, “but if I hit them, I don’t care. . . . If my family lived near the Soviet embassy, I would hit it. I wouldn’t care about them. If I am prepared to die, my son has to die for it, and my wife has to die for it.” These “qualities” were then praised in the Western media as exhibitions of an indomitable warrior race. Robert Fisk, who reported on the conflict for the London
Times,
has written of the strict instructions to refer to the mujahideen as “freedom fighters,” regardless of any of their activities.

Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf of the ISI, who was centrally involved in training the mujahideen and selecting Pakistani commandos to cross the border and fight alongside them, defended these tactics in 2003:

Next was sabotage and assassination from within . . . this included placing a bomb under the dining-room table of Kabul University in
late 1983. The explosion, in the middle of the meal, killed nine Soviets, including a woman Professor. Educational institutions were considered fair game as the staff were all communists indoctrinating their students with Marxist dogma . . . this was corrupting the youth, turning them away from Islam.
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The same tactics and the same justifications, directed now against the United States and NATO, are said to represent the “sickness” of Islam and are traced back directly to the Koran or other Islamic teachings. In which case, one might ask, how is it that jihadi manuals circulating in the refugee camps and among the mujahideen were produced at the University of Nebraska–Omaha?

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since as the Afghan school-system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist creed.
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